The ‘Perfect Day Exercise’ and the short-sightedness of modern goal setting

The ‘Perfect Day Exercise’ is a perfect example of how to be entirely ‘right’ in everything you say, and entirely wrong in the context you’re saying it.

You’ve probably come across the ‘Perfect Day Exercise’. Especially at this goal-setting, go-getting, big-dreaming time of year.

The details dance about a bit, but the premise remains: write down, as precisely as possible, what your ‘perfect day’ looks like, from what time you would get up, to what clothes you’d put on, to when, where and for how long you’d meditate (because of course you would, probably right after you’d had your lemon water and reviewed your gratitude journal).

Here is a perfect example from Debbie Millman, on the Tim Ferriss podcast (in 2017):

It is Winter 2027. What does your life look like? What are you doing? Where are you living? Who are you living with? Do you have pets? What kind of house are you in? Is it an apartment are you in the city are you in the country? What does your furniture look like? What is your bed like? What are your sheets like? What kind of clothes do you wear? What kind of hair do you have? Tell me about your pets, tell me about your significant other, do you have children? Do you have a car? Do you have a boat? Talk about your career? What do you want? What are you reading? What are you making? What excites you? What is your health like?

Write this one day ten years from now. So one day in the winter of 2027, what does your whole day look like? Start from the minute you wake up, brush your teeth, have your coffee or tea, all the way through until minute you tuck yourself in at night. What is that day like for you? Dream big, dream without any fear. Write it all down. You don’t have to share it with anyone other than yourself. Put your whole heart into it. Write like there is no tomorrow; write like your life depends on it because it does. And then read it, once a year, and see what happens.

There’s something about this transcript so striking that it can make you worry about the state of humanity. Don’t worry if you didn’t spot it, we’ll get to it in a sec.

You do not need to search far to find people who’ve claimed this exercise has transformed their lives.

Got them out of a slump.

Made them more productive.

Helped them overcome limiting beliefs.

Increased their appreciation of what they were already in a position to do, and so shunted them out of spinning around waiting for circumstances to magically lock into place.

These are all good things! And I believe these people when they say these good things happened!

For example this guy:

It’s a very simple exercise but it’s incredibly powerful. After I did this initial exercise, I compared it to my calendar and saw the massive delta between what my normal day looked like versus my perfect day. I was literally on the phone or in meetings from 8 am through till late in evening. Fire fighting, fixing things, being pulled from one direction to another without having time to think or rest. It explained why I was feeling so drained, unhappy and worn out. It was a wake up call that forced me to rethink my career and make some changes to my lifestyle in general.

Realising, like Bud Fox in Wall Street, that you don’t need tens of millions before you can ride your motorbike across China, or do 97% of whatever else you most want to do in life is great!

Basically every advice to stop doing dumb stuff when you can fairly easily do less-dumb stuff is helpful, whether that’s a smoker realising that smoking is actually kinda bad, or a workaholic realising that spending their whole life making money at the expense of making their soul really sad is a bit of a silly trade-off.

It’s great, but it’s also pretty limited.

And it can be (and often is) downright dangerous.

A lunchtime ‘mindfulness’ session in the middle of a stressful 12-hour day doing immoral work is, right then and there, probably a good thing. But if it enables you to dodge the breaking point that would set your life on a wiser path, the consequences are catastrophic.

(Related: it’s incredibly sad how many financial-planning meetings involve finding ways to suggest to someone that the way in which they live is an important thing to pay attention to without breaking down and screaming: ‘YOU SPEND 90 HOURS A WEEK AT WORK, HOW CAN YOU NOT STOP AND THINK A BIT HARDER ABOUT IF IT’S WHAT YOU WANT TO BE DOING?’)

The limits of the Perfect Day Exercise

Look again at the Debbie Millman example above. There are 20 questions, summed up in two words: WHAT and HAVE. There are 14 explicit ‘whats’ in the list, though it’s not the count but the vibe that’s most important: what do those all those whats say?

Remember we’re talking about perfection of a life. If your life is anything near perfect, do you really think you’re in any way bothered by the kind of house you’re living in, or the kind of sheets on your bed?

So beyond, perhaps, helping those like our chap above who’d got stuck doing things that made him miserable day in, day out, what’s the point of the exercise?

‘Aha!’ some may cry. ‘The whats are merely the ‘meet them where they are’ trick. It’s really about how people feel.’

For example, here:

Secondly, [people doing this exercise] notice the way they feel. This is an important part of the exercise. How we want to feel is much more powerful than just mentally deciding we want something. A feeling creates a emotional reaction to that ‘thing we want’ and makes us far more likely to go after it than just setting our self an arbitrary goal.

When making an advert effective, using ‘feelings’ in service of pursuing a thing makes sense. When living a bit more wisely, it really doesn’t.

The person that pins a picture of a Rolex, or a private jet, or a dream holiday, or a killer set of abs on their mood board is almost certainly more likely to end up with one.

But it tells you nothing of how they got there, or what difference getting ‘there’ actually made. And that’s surely the thing that matters more!

It can be really hard for people swimming in these advert-infected waters to understand that the value of (almost) everything to you is nothing. Because what the hell does that say to your life choices?! Admitting that most of what you dedicated your life to acquiring was ultimately a bit pointless kills the ultimate, 24/7-365 distraction machine that prevents people from seeing that prioritising distractions over relationships is a damned foolish way to live.

All roads lead to the brain

The Perfect Day Exercise preys on our foolish approach to hope, where a Good Life is a wishlist, a daily manifestation, and a spot of no-pain-no-gain hustle away.

But the Good Life is written in your brain. And changing your brain takes longer, and involves tilting your attention in an entirely different direction.

You can’t sell this. You can’t reduce it into a bullet-point book, or expand it into a one-day training session.

But you can do it.

And you probably should.